But maybe you carried your demons with you everywhere, the way you carried your shadow.

The kidnapping, the kiss. I brought him here, after all. I rescue him an pulled him into this new life, a life of freedom and feeling.

When he speaks again, I can tell that he's smiling. "So I guess we saved each other.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

And even if she isn’t—even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds—she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn’t even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn’t have the stomach for it.

Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close.

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose. We are even free to choose the wrong thing.